Is Saturday night television ever going to be all right again? The final of The Voice this year suffered its lowest ratings ever, having lost almost a third of the 6.3 million viewers who watched in 2015. To be fair, the BBC1 show had to compete with the launch of ITV best performer Britain’s Got Talent, which took a 40.3% share of all TV viewing in its primetime Saturday night slot. Yet, although 8.8 million of us tuned in to watch a man almost impale himself on a swallowed sword, that was 1.3 million fewer than watched in 2015.
Netflix, the streaming juggernaut with 75 million subscribers worldwide, said last week that it was looking to reinvent entertainment formats. First up should be a show for television executives called The Hunt for a New Format. The prize could be an unscripted hit for the next generation, unveiled on a Saturday night to a television scheduler weeping with relief and joy.
Television executives are always looking for the next new hit, but this time it’s different. After a long period dominated by reality and factual entertainment hits from Big Brother to Strictly, schedulers are dealing with a fundamental shift in the kind of content we want to consume because of the success of streaming services and on-demand.
The arrival and increasing power of streaming services both introduced viewers to the crack cocaine of video-on-demand and made stories, or drama, more addictive. Drama now represents the most risk-averse kind of commissioning on television, and increasingly seems like the only game in town. Scripted and therefore more easily controlled by TV controllers, it acts as a sort of comfort blanket for those facing the imminent death of linear television.
For cash-strapped broadcasters facing a revolution, drama represents a relatively safe bet while they all tear their hair out looking for the next Bake Off.
The BBC even went so far as to axe a channel for the first time in nearly 80 years of television broadcasting rather than chop the money available for scripted shows such as Sherlock and Doctor Who. Some £30m saved from making BBC3 online-only has been ploughed into drama, which already accounts for about one fifth of BBC1’s huge content budget.
Last month’s launch of a new season of BBC programmes by uber-controller Charlotte Moore was full of new drama, including adaptations of Zadie Smith’s novel NW and Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. Drama has also helped make Sunday night the new Friday and Saturday nights combined, not just with big ratings but with a huge buzz over the broadcasters’ palliative to Monday morning blues.
The £20m The Night Manager enjoyed an average audience of 6.2 million and has already launched in the US. ITV may have given up trying to compete with the BBC’s coveted “Andrew Davies slot” at 9pm but appears to have scored a hit with The Durrells, which achieved 2016’s biggest drama launch audience - 6.4 million.
Gerald Durrell’s bestselling books involve animals in a sunny location – what’s not to love? In an age of unlimited supply, stories are proving more addictive than quiz shows that will be on again next week with new participants.
Drama has become so dominant that there’s a new trend for real-life crime to be made dramatic, as in the The People v OJ Simpson. There are cost implications for broadcasters in the trend towards screening more drama, even if many feel like a comparatively easy option. Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings said last week that the costs of television production could see a “spectacular” rise as it increasingly competes with film.
Terrestrial broadcasters cannot show drama alone, what with the pesky charter and public service remits to meet. In contrast, dramas such as House of Cards and Better Call Saul accounted for seven out of Netflix’s top 10 shows in March. The other three were comedies.
Channel 4, with a smaller budget than its bigger terrestrial rivals, BBC and ITV, has at least given us First Dates and Gogglebox. The latter, criticised at launch for its TV-eating-itself nature, now enjoys regular consolidated audiences of more than 5 million.
In such a competitive market, is it any wonder that successful shows spawn more children than seems wise? All you need to do is Google “TV shows about cars” to see quite how many versions of Top Gear and the new Whatever-it’s-called-with-Clarkson there are. It’s as if no one realises that it wasn’t really the cars but the trio’s relationship that made the original the most lucrative BBC show ever produced.
And none of this focus on drama detracts from the fact that some of the biggest shows on TV at the moment depict a sort of fantasy of real life in which people make amazing cakes and live in the countryside.
Now the BBC is said to be looking to commission a kind of Saturday Night Live for the UK. Michael McIntyre returned to BBC1 with his six-part Big Show this weekend. Saturday night is still not all right, and the hunt for the Next Big Thing is far from over.
